Like many librarians in all kinds of libraries I was delighted when the Digital Public Library of America launched last Spring. I’m probably not alone in having lost time searching through the content that the DPLA’s portal website provides access to, marveling at the images, objects, and information held by libraries, archives, and museums across the U.S. I’m still not exactly sure how I can intentionally use the DPLA in my practice as an instruction and reference librarian, but I’m continuing to think on the possibilities.

One of the great things about the DPLA is its API (application programming interface) that allows developers to access the metadata collected by the DPLA and create applications that use the DPLA’s searchable content. So far ten apps have been created — all are highlighted on the DPLA website. I’ve read a bit about (and played with) several that seem to have the potential for use in academic libraries:

WP DPLA Plugin
During this past June’s THATCamp at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University, developer Boone Gorges won the Maker Challenge with this plugin for the WordPress blogging/website software. Once installed, the plugin uses the tags attached to a blog post to search for and display random items from collections available via the DPLA website. The resulting illustrations are fascinating, especially if the words used as tags have very different meanings. Boone is also the lead developer on a WordPress-based teaching and learning platform at my college, the City Tech OpenLab; my colleagues and I are looking forward to installing and playing with this plugin soon.

Serendipomatic
The most recently released DPLA app also seems to have lots of promise for use by academic librarians and researchers. Just three weeks ago the RRCHNM* held its National Endowment for the Humanities-funded One Week One Tool institute, in which twelve folks from academia, museums, and libraries came together to create a digital tool for research and teaching. The resulting website, Serendip-o-matic, strives to inject some serendipity into browsing digital collections. Simply paste text into the box on the website’s homepage and Serendip-o-matic returns items from collections at the DPLA as well as Flickr Commons, Europeana, and Australia’s Trove. Serendip-o-matic can also search tags from a Zotero account, which is pretty nifty. Here’s a snapshot of the results I got with some text about my research on undergraduate scholarly habits (click image to embiggen):

DPLA Bot
Finally, just for fun (and because so many academic librarians use Twitter), who couldn’t love the DPLA Bot? Created by Davidson College professor of Digital Studies Mark Sample, DPLA Bot is a bot (short for web robot, an automated application that runs over the internet) that uses a random keyword to search the DPLA and tweets out a link to the result. The bot runs several times per day; here’s one of my favorite tweets from this week:

I can install a WordPress plugin and tweak HTML or CSS, but that’s about the extent of my programming chops these days. For those of us who are unlikely to create DPLA apps ourselves, how might we use the existing apps in our academic library work? What other kinds of apps could be developed for academic and research libraries to use with DPLA collections?